Johnny Carson

Library of Congress, NY World Collection

Johnny Carson took over the "Tonight" show from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, he became the biggest, most popular star American television has known. Virtually every American with a television set saw and heard a Carson monologue at some point in those years. At his height, between 10 million and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him.

Mr. Carson was often called "the king of late night," and he wielded an almost regal power. Beyond his enormous impact on popular culture, Mr. Carson more than any other individual shifted the nexus of power in television from New York to Los Angeles, with his decision in 1972 to move his show from its base in Rockefeller Center in New York to NBC's West Coast studios in Burbank, Calif. That same move was critical in the changeover of much of television from live to taped performances.

In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easily and celebrities who talked too much.

All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Mr. Carson's Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. Members of the public couldn't say whether they were on Johnny Carson's side or he was on theirs. All they knew was that they liked him and felt they knew him - a claim most of those who were close to him in his life, including his wives, family and "Tonight" staff members, would not make with much confidence. They knew Mr. Carson was intensely private, a self-described loner who shunned the spotlight when off camera.